The Thran

by J. Robert King

  The shimmering foundation tilted as it rose, curving toward its final, level orientation. It overtopped the Council Hall. Powerstones drifted just above Rebbec’s head. The jagged underbelly of the foundation bathed her in radiance. As it passed by, Rebbec reached up fondly and ran her hands along the stones.

  The foundation had only just cleared the spot where she was before it halted in air. Level now, the plane of stones sank slowly into position, just beyond and just above the pinnacle where Rebbec stood.

  She spoke again, and the crowd hushed. “Here will be our temple.”

  Another ovation rang out.

  “It lies just above and beyond our former reach. It is more than a mere step that separates it from the world below. It is a leap. Any who would enter the temple must leave the world behind and leap through clear air to reach it. Let me be the first to take that leap.”

  The silence of the crowd deepened. The world held its breath.

  Yawgmoth actually stood in his floating sedan chair. He clung to the curvilinear white bars that encased it.

  Rebbec leaped. The tiny shadow of her figure broke free of the covetous earth. She hung for a moment between the worlds. Her foot came down upon the gleaming temple.

  The cry that answered that landing was like the blast of a volcano.

  No sooner had Rebbec landed on the floating space than her image shot through every stone. It gleamed down in a million projections on those who waited below.

  “Welcome, Halcyon!”

  The frozen throng shifted and broke. Those nearest the Council Hall flooded up the broad stair Rebbec had added to the eastern facade. In moments, young men and women gained the rooftop. Their eyes were lit with idealistic joy. They ran toward the central dome and the stairway that spiraled around it.

  Yawgmoth saw his moment. He sat again and grasped the control stone of his sedan chair. The craft leaped to the pressure of his hand and vaulted across the upper city. The Council Hall dome swelled out below him. He reached its peak in a moment, before anyone else. Taking his hand from the control stone, he halted the craft in midair, climbed out, and dropped onto the dome. Laughing joyously, he scrambled up the pinnacle spire. At its peak, he hurled himself across the emptiness.

  The world swung vertiginously beneath him. He landed on the shimmering foundation—in the surprised arms of Rebbec.

  Together they spilled, laughing, to the smooth stone floor—robes tangled in robes, arms and legs intertwined. They struggled to stand.

  Yawgmoth wrapped Rebbec in a joyous embrace. “You’ve done it, Rebbec! You’ve done it!” His voice echoed through the high city.

  “We have all done it!” she exclaimed in response and returned his embrace.

  * * *

  —

  Those words almost killed Glacian. The words and the laughter and the glimmering image of Rebbec in that bastard’s arms. They almost killed him.

  The temple foundation made his lesions fester.

  “Take me…back down,” Glacian gasped to the man who had wheeled his chair up the steep streets. “I cannot bear the glare of that thing!”

  Rebbec sat upon the Thran Temple’s floating foundation. All around her, crystal footings stood, glinting darkly in the setting sun. They seemed like teeth in a huge bear trap, set to catch a lumbering god. Orange sunlight twisted through them and turned cold—fire glimpsed through icicles.

  Rebbec shook her head, a shiver running through her. She had not anticipated this mood of her temple. Its other moods were wondrous. Before dawn, it caught the coming radiance and brought it down to the people of Halcyon. In daylight, it was a warming marvel that gleamed like the city’s own private sun. Even beneath blue clouds, the temple teased strands of red and yellow light from the rest and sent them down across the city. When thunderheads piled into the sky, the temple made one lightning strike into twenty. It peered into the malicious heart of the storm and terrified all inside the city but also foretold the first break of sun through clouds. At sunset, though, in premonition of the coming night, a frigid, caliginous presence possessed the structure. Beaming gold became icy silver. Crimson flames became blankets of snow.

  Twice, Rebbec had tried to linger in the chill temple. The place had become a cave of ice. Moonlight and starlight had spun themselves into specters and wraiths. The temple that focused daylight in upon its worshipers did the same to night, leaving the heart black and cold and haunted. Rebbec had stood at the center of her creation and striven to endure it. She could not.

  Was this truly a fault of design or art? An oracle sees what an oracle sees.

  Tonight, Rebbec was determined to remain. Body weary with the day and skin dotted in sweat, she trembled. The malign presence—darkness incarnate—wrapped her and chilled her.

  Leaving was almost as terrible as remaining. Rebbec’s Architecture of Ascension did not allow for pleasant departures. To leave any of her buildings meant regression, slipping back from sublimity to mundanity. All that was gained by entering was lost by leaving. This structure was the worst. It had the longest, most tortuous descent of any building she had created, all of it in a region of soul-stealing dark and cold.

  “With greater promise comes greater peril,” Rebbec reminded herself. To invoke a private sun for her city, she had to invite also the vastness of killing space. “If I cannot bear the dark heart of my creation, how can I expect my city to?”

  She drew an algid breath and braced herself against the night.

  It reached out and bodily laid hold of her. Its hand was heavy and implacable on her shoulder, and it spun her about.

  “There you are,” came an accusing voice. A shadow loomed before her.

  “Yawgmoth!” Rebbec gasped, her knees wanting to fold. He grabbed her arms to hold her up, and his fingers were icicles. She cursed. “What are you doing, stalking about in the night? You terrified me.”

  “Didn’t you hear me calling you?” he asked. “I was shouting all the way up the dome and spire.”

  His hands were cold. She drew away from him. “No. It’s part of the design. The temple blocks out the sound of things below. It is supposed to have pulled free of the world and its shifting demands—”

  “Enough,” Yawgmoth hushed gently. “You should spend more time with people, Rebbec, and less with cold crystal. You love your ideas, your designs, but you forget whom you are designing them for.”

  “I’m sorry. I get so entombed in my work,” she said. “But tonight is different. This is a vigil. It’s a holy pilgrimage through darkness. I am thinking of the people. I’m thinking of divinity and humanity and the long hours ahead.”

  “I’ve come to get you. There is news, grave news—”

  “Glacian!”

  “He’s fine,” Yawgmoth comforted, “for the moment. Though the news does impact him. It impacts us all.”

  “What is it?” Rebbec asked, turning toward him.

  “Not here,” he said, taking her hand. His fingers now were warm. “Below. In the infirmary. I want to tell you and Glacian and Gix all at once. There’s a sedan chair waiting at the base of the Council Hall. I would have landed here but—”

  “I don’t want anyone to land a sedan chair here,” Rebbec broke in. “It destroys the symbolism.”

  “I know. You and your symbolism, Rebbec. You live in a world of ideas, and an attack on symbolism is for you as devastating as a earthquake is for the rest of us. I know you, my dear. I know that each building you design is meant to invite the rest of us to come live in your world of ideas. I know you build these buildings to bring us close to you, but with every crystal you place, you get farther away,” Yawgmoth said. “Come with me tonight. Come back to the common world below—the world of contingency, as you call it. We have grave contingencies to discuss.”

  Rebbec seemed still lost behind her eyes. She gnawed her lip and said simply. “Yes.”

&nb
sp; * * *

  —

  “How could such demons have built this paradise?” Gix wondered, strapped to his bed. The ceilings were clean, the bed was warm, the rooms were bright, the food exquisite, the views spectacular….But the citizens—“They treat me like a hunk of meat.”

  Yawgmoth forever cut and stitched, impaled and infused. He did it all with feverish intensity, seeing the disease but not the man.

  Glacian was worse. He was the monster the rest of the citizens aspired to become—bitter, selfish, paranoid, brutal….

  “Demons,” the young man sighed.

  “Shut up,” growled Glacian. The man lay still, back toward the Untouchable.

  “It’s true. You’re a bunch of demons,” Gix said.

  “You say that only because you don’t belong here. We’ve built this city, and we belong in it.” Glacian coughed spastically. “You and your kind built what you built in the caves, and that is where you belong.”

  “We didn’t build the caves. You did,” Gix spat back. “It’s the dark shadow of Halcyon. You can’t make a perfect place. You can’t make a perfect life. Life is all jumbled up, the good and the bad. All you can do is try to separate them—put all the good stuff in one place and the bad stuff in another. To build your beautiful city you had to make the Caves of the Damned, where you could stash all the stuff you didn’t want. To make your beautiful citizens, you had to throw half the people into the garbage.”

  “We didn’t throw you into the garbage. You gravitated toward it,” Glacian corrected.

  “We aren’t going to be garbage any longer. We’re climbing out, Glacian. We’re climbing out and looking for the people who shoved us down there. We’re going to kill you.”

  Glacian laughed bitterly. The sound was almost indistinguishable from his cough. “You’re going to try to kill us, flooding up the sewers like plague rats. Like rats, you’ll end up stomped back into the ground.”

  “You and your people are doomed, Glacian.”

  “You and your people are deluded, Gix.”

  “We may all be deluded and doomed,” came a voice at the door. Yawgmoth strode into the room. His intense eyes seemed to drag the shadows in with him. He cast a looming image across the walls and ceiling. “I have some grave news.”

  “How are you, Glacian?” interrupted Rebbec, rushing to kneel by her husband’s bedside. In a ritual well established over the last months, she wrapped a scarf over her nose and mouth and placed a clean cloth over her hands before touching him. Worry filled her eyes. “You look worse than this morning.”

  “It’s this flea-bitten stoat,” Glacian said, flinging a weary hand back toward Gix, “yammering on with grand delusions of genocide.”

  “They may not be delusions,” Yawgmoth said. “I’ve found the cause of the illness. It could well mean the death of all of us in Halcyon—” his eyes were twin spikes—“and in the caves below.”

  Glacian growled. “Well, out with it! We’re dying anyway.”

  “Powerstones,” Yawgmoth said. “In great concentration, their energies are toxic.”

  “What?” Glacian and Rebbec chorused.

  “Toxic,” Yawgmoth repeated. He fished a crimson stone from his pocket, a glimmering gem the size of a man’s heart. “A single stone gives very little danger, but in combination—in devices such as the sedan chairs and whisper doorways, in the very homes and streets of Halcyon—they produce crosscurrents that disrupt the fabric of growing things. This is the origin of the phthisis. Your flesh degenerates because it cannot regenerate. The influence of powerstones prevents natural healing, even the provision of tissues with life-sustaining nutrients.”

  “That’s impossible,” Glacian said, hacking. “Why isn’t your hand withering, then?”

  “Every creature has a resistance to these effects, just as every creature has a resistance to other diseases. Some might even be immune. But for most of us, our resistance can be worn down by constant exposure to powerstone matrices. And once resistance is gone, our tissues break down and die. Eventually, so do we,” Yawgmoth said grimly.

  His solemn tones were interrupted by giggles from Gix. All eyes turned hatefully on the young man—even Glacian rolled over to glare. Gix was only encouraged by their ire. He laughed delightedly.

  “I told you. You’re doomed. The stones that make your beautiful city possible are killing you. You can’t remain here and live. You can’t get rid of your powerstones without your city collapsing. You won’t return to living like every other person in the world.” He stopped to shriek with laughter. “You’re killing yourselves, and you’re not even willing to stop!”

  “Your people are just as doomed,” Yawgmoth said soberly. “Glacian might have at last caught the disease when you stabbed him with a powerstone, but his resistance had been worn down by long work in the mana rig. And that’s why the disease runs rampant in the Caves of the Damned. The energies in the mana rig are poisoning the Untouchables.”

  In a moment, Gix’s glee turned to rage. “Demons! That’s what you are. Demons!”

  Rebbec stood, approaching Yawgmoth. She dragged the scarf from her face. Imploring eyes fixed on him.

  “This can’t be true. I’ve been building the temple for two years now. It is the most powerful matrix of powerstones ever assembled. I show no signs of the disease.”

  “You may be immune,” Yawgmoth said gently. “That is my hope. The fact you were so long exposed to your husband without catching it makes me think you are. After all, it is contagious, person to person. The ravaged resistance of one ravages the resistance of another. Infected flesh infects other flesh.” He clutched her hands in his own. “I am hoping you are immune.”

  “Lies! Damned lies!” Glacian shouted. “You came here, an outcast, a criminal. You came because we were desperate to try anything, even your monstrous ideas of healing. Now you tell us powerstones kill? I suppose you want to do away with all artifacts, all artificers. No, this cannot be true. For thousands of years, we have lived with powerstones. For thousands of years, healers—true healers—have made us whole with life force, have not carved us up like butchered boars.”

  “Those healers have failed you,” Yawgmoth said, fire flaring in his eyes. “Their very touch is poison to you—more magic to eat away your flesh. I offer the only hope. I have found the source of the disease. I will find the cure for it. I will save your miserable life, Glacian—and yours, Gix. I will save the lives of the citizens and the damned. I will discover a way to make all of us immune so that the city can live, so that the Thran Temple can be the glory of all ages, so that a whole race will leap into the future and not cower back from it. That is what this witch doctor will do!”

  “You’ll do none of that!” hissed Glacian. “You’re incapable of healing, only of dissecting. I’ll see you banished again—”

  “Wait, Glacian—” interrupted Rebbec.

  “I’ll rally the elders against you to declare you a criminal of the state—”

  “Please, husband—”

  “To outlaw your practices, your lies!”

  “Are they lies?” shouted Yawgmoth. He strode to a drawer, drew a scalpel, and slashed down at Gix. The blade cut through the straps from the man’s shoulders to his hips. Another deft cut laid open the young man’s bed clothes, revealing a pale chest and belly, marked with lesions. Yawgmoth set the crimson powerstone on the man’s sternum and held Gix’s hands down at his side. Even as they all watched, the skin beneath the stone turned brown and cracked. Blood and lymph welled upward. The corruption spread slowly outward. “Lies? Lies?”

  Gix shrieked, twisting in agony.

  “Stop, Yawgmoth!” Rebbec cried, lunging in to grab the stone. She lifted it, but Yawgmoth caught her wrist.

  He glared piercingly into her eyes. “Is it a lie? Is it?”

  “No,” she gasped, staring incredulously at the man’s fis
t. “Let go! You’re hurting me. You’re hurting him! Maybe you are our only hope. Maybe you’ll find the cure, but don’t forget the people you’re finding the cure for.”

  Those words seemed to stab into Yawgmoth. His clenched fingers trembled on her wrist. Then suddenly, he released her hand, rose, and strode to the door. He paused a moment before striding through, turning back toward the woman and his two patients.

  Haunted eyes stared at Rebbec, and he said simply, “Yes.”

  Glacian knew Yawgmoth lied. He’d known from the first moment he had met the man. This is a charlatan and a monster, he had told himself.

  Yawgmoth’s latest lie was the most outlandish of all. To think the very basis of Thran ascendance was rotting the people who created it…to think that the foundations of the empire were so cracked and caving…and to base it all on eugenicist theory: that humans were mere animals, that they were animated by fluids and little “beasties,” that every tissue was made up of smaller tissues, every organism of smaller organisms in an infinite regression—it was all ludicrous. Glacian knew it.

  Rebbec did not. Even as Yawgmoth burned the boy and stormed out the door, he had Rebbec’s ear. With that ear, he would gain the ear of all Halcyon.

  Glacian tried to warn his wife. Once the monster was gone, though, she heard only the screams of the boy. She had a fragile heart. She was a glass dove in her glass temple.

  The boy—a worse faker than Yawgmoth. His blackened sternum was nothing next to Glacian’s lesions. Did Rebbec crouch over her own husband in worry? Did she touch his bare skin the way she had touched the boy’s to lift that killing stone from him—he a phthisis-carrying Untouchable? Did she pay Glacian any mind? No. Glacian did not exaggerate his ills. He complained only a tenth of the woes he suffered—unlike this upstaging brat.

  “He’s not that hurt!” Glacian growled at last.

  “Shut up!” she had said desperately.